Category: Geekery

Glass “whiteboard”

Back when I worked for Frontier/Global Crossing, my cow orkers who had window offices often used them as whiteboards. That impressed me as such a good idea that when I went to SunGard and had a window office, I started doing the same thing myself.

Today, I needed to hash out some big diagrams, transaction diagrams and XML with a couple of other guys, and since none of us had very big whiteboards in our office, I suggested we use the windows in the break room. The people I was meeting with didn’t believe me at first, but went along with it once I demostrated that it wipes off as easily as on a whiteboard. But everybody who came into the break room while we were at work stared in disbelief and made sarcastic remarks.

Is using a window as a whiteboard really that unusual?

Some network benchmarks

I wanted to see how fast my rack is. Now, I think that one of my shares is doing a bittorrent at the same time, so this is a conservative test. For most of these, I’m doing a wget of the Rochester Road Runner speed test file at http://speedtest.rochester.rr.com/testlarge.zro

  • From RR.com to my home machine: 19:12:13 (392.85 KB/s)
  • From RR.com to my rack: 19:02:44 (493.74 KB/s)
  • From my rack to my home machine: 20:00:30 (364.74 KB/s)

(Yeah, I know the times and the given KB/s values don’t make sense. I just report them as wget reports them.)

That’s not bad. I think it shows that the rack system can keep the 10BaseT network connection pretty saturated. Both up and down.

That’s a rack!

I put my server on the rack today and xen1.xcski.com is open for business. I’ve already moved the Rochester Flying Club and Rochester Association of Family Mediators web sites over. As the DNS changes propogate, I’ll be able to remove the ones on the linode.

It appears that mail is working on the new site as well, so I’ll move the mailman mailing lists over pretty soon. I’ll probably move this blog over there as well. Then comes the hard part – moving the navaid.com application over.

The only sour note is that when I started up the rack, one of the quarter share xens didn’t want to come up correctly. It complained about tons of fsck errors, and I decided to just wipe it and re-install it. I hope that doesn’t happen again. One thing I noticed is that the xen kernel doesn’t have the ext3 module compiled in, and so it’s mounting these file systems without journalling. I’m going to have to fix that.

More of the same.

Still muddling along on the project mentioned in Rants and Revelations » Stress, stress, and more stress. My boss wants my bit to be test-able and demo-able by the first of the month, and I’m not sure I can do it. I don’t think the other bits are going any better. The Chinese team have delivered something, but we can’t test it yet until my bit and Tony’s bit are finished. Kris is working on a bit that we were going to farm out to the Chinese team, but we decided it would be faster for him to do it than to try to explain it to them. It seems that in order specify the requirement in sufficent detail that you could just hand it over to a foreign team, you need a formal language. And the formal language we know best and can produce fastest is Java.

In added aggravation, just as I was turning into the parking lot at work this morning, my muffler started dragging on the ground. A quick examination seemed to indicate it was just the strap hangar broke, which is exactly what it turned out to be. Cheap, but time-consuming and annoying.

Meanwhile, the peridontist is going to be fixing my front teeth this Saturday. He says they have to make an incision in the front of my jaw, scrape out crud, and put in something to make the bone grow back. He says I won’t be able to “incise” for a couple of weeks.

Saturday is also the day when we have our MoveOn.org Call For Change party. I have a bit of a mental block against making phone calls to strangers thanks to an incident from my childhood, but maybe I can just play host.

On Monday, my 1U server goes off to the colo. I just got the network settings, so sometime on Sunday I have to take down the server and set up the networking.